As we have noted, it was formerly thought by paleontologists that
Neanderthal morphed into Cro-Magnon, and that Cro-Magnon was the
progenitor of human beings as we know them today. However, aside
from the problems of the Eve Hypothesis, there are serious problems
with the assumptions about when modern human types actually appeared
on Earth.

Even if we take the evolving scientific view of the
present day, we find that Cro-Magnon man was something altogether
different from other anatomically modern humans.

Over and over again we read in scientific studies that Cro-Magnon
man was just an “anatomically modern human”.

The experts will say:

“The Cro-Magnons lived in Europe between 35,000 and 10,000 years
ago. They are virtually identical to modern man, being tall and
muscular and slightly more robust than most modern humans.”

Notice how they slip in that “slightly more robust” bit.

The fact
is, the Cro-Magnon man was, compared to the other “anatomically
modern humans” around him, practically a superman. They were skilled
hunters, toolmakers and artists famous for the cave art at places
such as Lascaux, Chauvet, and Altamira. They had a high cranium, a
broad and upright face, and cranial capacity “about the same as
modern humans” (can we say larger?), but less than that of
Neanderthals. The males were as tall as 6 feet.

They appeared in
Europe in the upper Pleistocene, about 40,000 years ago and “their
geographic origin is still unknown”.

Their skeletal remains show a
“few small differences from modern humans”. Of course, the “out of
Africa” theory advocates suggest that Cro-Magnon came from Sub
Saharan Africa and a temperate climate and that, “they would
eventually adapt to all extremes of heat and cold”. In this way, the
“slight differences” between Cro-Magnon and other forms of
anatomically modern humans can be explained away as an adaptation to
cold.

But, as we will see, this idea doesn’t hold water.

Cro-Magnon’s tools are described as the Aurignacian technology,
characterized by bone and antler tools, such as spear tips (the
first) and harpoons. They also used animal traps, and bow and arrow.
They invented shafts and handles for their knives, securing their
blades with bitumen, a kind of tar, as long as 40 thousand years ago. Other improvements included
the invention of the atlatl, a large bone or piece of wood with a
hooked groove used for adding distance and speed to spears.

They
also invented more sophisticated spear points, such as those that
detach after striking and cause greater damage to prey.144 The
Cro-Magnon type man was also the “originator” of such abstract
concepts as “time”. They marked time by lunar phases, recording them
with marks on a piece of bone, antler or stone. Some of these
“calendars” contained a record of as many as 24 lunations.145

In the
relatively recent past, tool industries diversified.

The Gravettian
industry (25 to 15 thousand years ago), characterized by ivory tools
such as backed blades, is associated with mammoth hunters. One type
of brief industry was Solutrean, occurring from 18 to 15 thousand
years ago and limited to Southwest France and Spain. It is
characterized by unique and finely crafted “laurel leaf” blades,
made with a pressure technique requiring a great skill.

The industry
is associated with horse hunters. The tool industry of the Clovis
Culture in North America (11 to 8 thousand years ago) is notable for
its remarkable similarity to Solutrean. Some suggest that the
Solutrean culture migrated to North America around 12,000 thousand
years ago.146

Cro-Magnon people lived in tents and other man-made
shelters in groups of several families. They were nomadic
hunter-gatherers and had elaborate rituals for hunting, birth and
death. Multiple burials are common in the areas where they were
found. What is most interesting is that from 35 to 10 thousand years
ago, there was no differentiation by sex or age in burials.

They
included special grave goods, as opposed to everyday, utilitarian
objects, suggesting a very increased ritualization of death and
burial..147

They were the first confirmed to have domesticated
animals, starting by about 15 thousand years ago (though ancient
sapiens may have domesticated the dog as much as 200 thousand years
ago).

They were the first to leave extensive works of art, such as
cave paintings and carved figures of animals and pregnant women.
Huge caves lavishly decorated with murals depicting animals of the
time were at first rejected as fake for being too sophisticated.
Then they were dismissed as being primitive, categorized as hunting,
fertility or other types of sympathetic magic.

Re-evaluations have
put these great works of art in a more prominent place in art history.

They show evidence of
motifs, of following their own stylistic tradition, of
“impressionist” like style, perspective, and innovative use of the
natural relief in the caves. Also possible, considering the new
concepts of time reckoning practiced by Cro-Magnon, are abstract
representations of the passage of time, such as spring plants in
bloom, or pregnant bison that might represent summer.148

Aside from
pregnant women and other Goddess worship iconography,149
representations of people, “anthropomorphs,” are very few, and never
show the accuracy or detail of the other animals. Humans are
represented in simple outlines without features, sometimes with
“masks”, often without regard to proportion, being distorted and
isolated. At the Grottes des Enfants in France are found four
burials with red ocher, and associated with Aurignacian tools.

At
Lascaux, France, are the famous caves of upper Paleolithic cave art,
dated to 17 thousand years ago, and even older, in some cases, by
many thousands of years!

The modern human types that appeared in the Levant were, however,
somewhat different from Cro-Magnon. They were the sub-Saharan type,
less “robust” individuals than the Cro-Magnon “superman” of Europe.

What seems to be the truth of the matter is simply that the modern
humans of the Levant were “different” from the Cro-Magnon types that
“appeared” in Europe. Try as they would, there is simply was no way
to prove that Cro-Magnon evolved in Africa or the Levant and then
moved to Europe.

But then, how to explain what happened in any reasonable terms?

What
the archaeological record seems to show is that in Europe, after
millennia of almost no progress at all, even in the few areas where
modern man has been found, suddenly human culture seems to take off
like an explosion with the appearance of Cro-Magnon man.

Not only
does culture explode, but also new ways of doing things, new styles
and innovations that were utterly unknown in the period immediately
preceding them, suddenly appear, only to disappear again like an
outdated fad. From Spain to the Urals, sites list the developments
of sewing needles, barbed projectiles, fishhooks, ropes, meat drying
racks, temperature controlled hearths, and complex dwellings.

The most amazing part of all of it is the art. Art suddenly springs
onto the landscape, fully formed, with no period of gradual
development; no signs of childish attempts preceding it. A piece of
ivory carved 32,000 years ago is as
realistic as anything turned out
by the most accomplished carver of the present day.

The Upper Paleolithic signals the most fundamental change in human
behavior that the archaeological record may ever reveal.150 The only
explanation for this tremendous change is that a new kind of human
appeared on the earth stage.

150 Richard Klein, Stanford, quoted by Shreeve.

When we consider the difficulties of such an event, in terms of
“evolution”, we find that this presents a huge difficulty in our
understanding.

First of all, we still have the problem of a
60,000-year time lag between the appearance of the sub-Saharan
modern type man who was on the scene with no “improvements” in his
technology for that length of time.

If Cro-Magnon evolved in Africa,
why isn’t there a continuous record of incremental developments?

By
the same reasoning, if he evolved only after crossing the
Mediterranean to Europe, why isn’t there a continuous record of
incremental developments?

The most effective and popular way that science deals with this
crisis is to ignore it, to deny it, or to seek to twist the facts to
fit the theory.

Many archaeologists continue to account for the
cultural events of the Upper Paleolithic by tying them to the
emergence of a more modern, intellectually superior form of human
being from Africa. They propose a “second biological event” to
explain this, never mind that it left no tracks in any skeletal
shape.

Nowadays, the idea is to suggest that the other “modern men” of
sub-Saharan Africa were not really fully modern. They were
“near-modern”. Thus, Africa is preserved as the origin of all
mankind, and the only thing necessary was a breakthrough in the
African lineage, a “neurological event” that allowed this “new man”
to develop all these new cultural behaviors overnight, so to say.
What this amounts to is saying that the explosion of culture in the
Upper Paleolithic times did not happen earlier because other modern
men didn’t have the brains to make it happen.

Unfortunately, the
support for this idea amounts only to circular logic. What’s more,
it seems that if it were a “neurological event”, it would start in a
small place and spread outward.

But what seems to have happened is
that it sort of exploded in a lot of places at once: from Spain to
the Ural mountains in Russia! And in fact, the Middle East is the
LAST place where art appears.

The earliest known Aurignacian sites are in the Balkans, and they
are dated to around 43,000 years ago. Three thousand years later,
the Aurignacian craze is all over Europe.

We ought to note that the Neanderthals did not have art. What’s
more, there was essentially no change in their stone tools for
100,000 years.

Some people suggest that the impetus for culture was the sudden
development of speech. But that idea doesn’t hold much water either.
If we were to look at some of the aboriginal societies of Australia
and New Guinea, they are certainly Neanderthal like in their stone
tools. But they think and communicate in languages that are as rich
as ours, and they construct myths, stories and cosmologies with
these languages. They just don’t seem to be much interested in
technology.

There is another very strange thing about this explosion
of homo intellectualis technologicus: it seems to have sort of “lost
its steam” around 12,000 years ago.

We have already noted the
pottery making of the Jomon. Even more startling is the fact that
twenty-six thousand years ago the residents of
Dolni Vestonice were
firing ceramics in kilns. But you don’t read that in archaeology
textbooks. In the standard teachings, the emergence of ceramics is
linked to the functional use of pottery which supposedly did not
appear until the agricultural revolution in the Neolithic period
some 12,000 years after the kilns at Dolni were last used.

Oh dear!

Did we just stumble on something interesting? Didn’t we just note
that something happened to “cool” the steam of the cultural
explosion of the Upper Paleolithic and that it happened about 12,000
years ago? And we noted that the Jomon culture “began” at about the
same time. And here we note that the agricultural revolution
occurred at about the same time as that “loss of creative vigor”.

Could the two have some connection?

In Bulgaria, a thousand miles to the east of Dolni Vestonice, there
is
a cave called Bacho Kiro. It is famous for containing the
earliest known Aurignacian tool assemblages. They are 43,000 years
old.

This brings us to another curious thing about Neanderthal man: he
never seemed to go anywhere. He always made his tools out of what
was locally available, and he never seemed to travel at all. What
was made where it was made, stayed there. Nobody traded or shared
among the Neanderthal groups.

But it seems that right from the
beginning, Cro-Magnon man was traveling and sharing and exchanging
not only goods, but technology.

If there was a better form of stone
somewhere else, the word seemed to get around, and everybody had
some of it. Distinctive flints from southern Poland are found at Dolni Vestonice, a hundred miles to the south. Slovakian
radiolarite
of red, yellow and olive is found a hundred miles to the east. Later
in the Upper Paleolithic period, the famous “chocolate flint” of
southern Poland is found over a radius of two hundred and fifty
miles.151

151 Shreeve, op. cit.

Naturally, these rocks didn’t walk around on their own.
Human legs carried them. And that leads us to our next little
problem with Cro-Magnon man: You see, his legs were too long.

One of the sacred laws of evolutionary biology is called “Allen’s
Rule”.

This rule posits that legs, arms, ears, and other body
extremities should be shorter in mammals that live in cold
climates, and longer in mammals of the same period who live where it
is hot. This is because having short arms and legs conserves heat.
This is supposed to explain why Eskimos and Laplanders have short
legs. It also is supposed to explain why Bantu people are leaner,
and the Maasai are extremely long and lean in their tropical open
country.

The only people who seem to be mocking Allen’s rule are Cro-Magnon.

They just refused to adapt. They all have much longer legs than they
ought to. Of course, this is pounced upon as proof that they came
from Africa. The only problem with this is that it is hard to
imagine people from a warm climate migrating to a cold one by
choice. Then, on top of that, to remain long-limbed for over a
thousand generations? Keep in mind that, during that time, the
thermometer kept going down and, at the glacial maximum, 18,000
years ago, it was like the North Pole in northern Europe!

So how
come they didn’t adapt?

By whatever means they arrived in Europe, we ought to take note of
the fact that their presence there may be related to the fact that
Europe and other nearby locations are literally blanketed with
megaliths. Indeed, it may be so that the megaliths came long after
the appearance of Cro-Magnon man, but the connection ought not to be
discarded without some consideration.

We have still another problem here, and it has to do with dating.
Analyzing
mitochondrial DNA data to reconstruct the demographic
prehistory of Homo Sapiens reveals statistical evidence of explosive
growth around 50,000 to 60,000 years ago. Is there a connection
between this DNA evidence and the appearance of Cro-Magnon man?

If
so, it would mean that the DNA is dated to twice the age that
archaeology confirms.

Instead of assuming that the archaeological
dates are correct, perhaps we ought to ask the question: could
something be wrong with the dating? From a morphological point of
view as well as judging by their industry and art, these highly
evolved humans who coexisted with Neanderthal man represent a
mutation so enormous and sudden as to be absurd in the context of
evolutionary theory.

What in the world are we going to do with this problem?

I could
exhaustively describe the endless books and papers that seek to
explain it away; to account for it, to marginalize it, and even
ignore it. But at the end of it all, the fundamental problem still
remains: a new kind of man appeared on the planet, seemingly from
nowhere, and he was smart, artistic, and however he got here, he
landed in a lot of places simultaneously.

Did I say “landed”?
Yes, I did.

Am I suggesting that Cro-Magnon man was an alien? Not
exactly.

We still have to consider the mitochondrial DNA of Eve. I
also haven’t forgotten that annoying problem of the Asian vs.
African origins of the “first mother” that has been so deftly dealt
with by avoidance and non-answers.

What do all of these factors,
taken together, suggest?

Well, any farmer can figure that one out:
it suggests hybridization. But that would imply somebody doing the
hybridizing. Further, we might wish to make note of the range of
this culture that suddenly dropped in on Europe: from Spain (and a
small region of North Africa) to the Ural Mountains that are at the
border of Central Asia.

The steppes of Central Asia, just north of Turkmenia, are a
difficult environment for agriculture. Goats and sheep and cattle
bones are found there that date to about 4000 BC. Later, the camel and horse came into use. These
cultures spoke Indo-European languages and their members are
believed to have been Caucasoid.

There have been many theories that
the Caucasoid nomads of the Central Asian steppes migrated to
Europe.

But, as we have seen, the initial migration may have been
from West to East. The archaeological record is uncertain, and
therefore the migrations of the Indo-Europeans (for so we may most
assuredly call them) from the Asian steppes are no longer as clear
in the minds of scholars as they once were.152 The migrations into
India and Pakistan, however, do seem to have some firmer foundation.

152 Renfrew, 1973, 1987.

These incursions were most likely from the
Andronovo and Srubnaya
cultures as the culture described in the oldest Aryan texts is very
similar to that of the steppe nomads.